Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: normies

Blending in with the normies

I went to the pharmacy the other day to pick up my meds, duh. I made the chitchat with the person at the counter, which, as we live in Minnesota, was about the weather.  It’s a balmy 41 degrees, but it’s going to dramatically drop soon. There is a severe weather warning for sudden drop in temps and gusts of wind up to 40 mph. The teller was saying, “That’s what we get for living in Minnesota” while I sympathetically said it’s time to get the heater going. I know the right words to say in this situation!

Never mind that I love cold and that I am grumpy with 41 degrees. Never mind that we do, indeed, live in Minnesota, which is notorious for its cold. We are in the middle of a Wind Chill Advisory at the moment with warnings that it could get down to -35 windchill. That’s pretty cold, even for me.

Anyway! I have had a version of this ‘it’s so cold’ chat many times while paying for my groceries. There was a period in my life when I’d try to say that I liked cold or something to that effect because I wanted to put it out there that not everyone hated cold. I gave up on that rather quickly, however, because no one wanted to hear that. Also, the cashiers don’t need that in their life. They’re just making small talk, not trying to get to know me and my philosophies.

I don’t feel the need to make my uniqueness known to people I’m not going to interact with on a meaningful level. I have to admit that I was irked after getting out of the hospital because my mother would blurt out my life story to anyone who would listen. She would use it as a way to get what she wanted, which made me very uncomfortable. I was venting to my brother about it and he said, “Remember, no one will think of you at the end of the day.” Which, weirdly enough, comforted me. He was right. These people would go home at the end of the day and not even remember they met me. You are never as big in someone else’s mind as you are in your own.

I am a weirdo, I will cheerfully admit it. I revel in it and have no problem with people knowing it. I am known to be oppositional, but I come by it honestly. It started when I was a fat, gawky, Taiwanese American girl in a lily-white St. Paul suburb. I didn’t know anything about pop culture and I had no idea how to fake it. Seriously. We didn’t go to movies and the first pop song I ever heard was Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant in sixth grade. That’s probably an apocryphal story rather an actual memory, but it sums up my childhood experience rather neatly.


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Beyond freaks and geeks

Oh, you think the darkness is your ally, you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man; by then, it was nothing to me but blinding! The shadows betray you, because they belong to me. I will show you where I have made my home, I will be preparing to bring justice.

–Bane

I was born a weirdo, and I’m comfortable living on the fringe. Hell, more than comfortable–I thrive on the edges. I’ve never been a normie, even though I’ve tried hard to fit in. I wore a powder blue sweater for my senior picture, had feathered bangs, and wore makeup. Whenever I think about it or see a copy, I stare in wonder. Who was that girl, and how did I know her? When I spent a year abroad in Asia, I quit doing all the girly things I had started doing just because I felt I should. I stopped shaving my legs and armpits–I didn’t really need to especially since as a Taiwanese American person, I didn’t have much hair. I cut my hair short so I didn’t have to deal with it (and because it was too damn hot for my usual mop), and I stopped wearing makeup because it just melted off my face in a hot second, anyway.

I felt much more myself once I stripped away all that shit. I still wore earrings, but no other jewelry, and my style of dress was lackadaisical at best. In Thailand, I had someone tell me I looked like a gratui, which is a boy who dresses/looks like a girl.  It was said with a laugh and no intention of malice, but it stung. I had enough issues with my own femininity; I didn’t need other people questioning it as well. I never felt like I was enough of a woman, though to be clear, I didn’t feel like a man, either. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a boy so badly, I would pray to God to make me a boy. I mean, hey, He created the world, right? So making me a boy shouldn’t be any big thing for Him. It never happened, and I woke up every minute feeling bitterly disappointed. Again, I want to stress that I did not want to be a boy; I just didn’t want to be a girl. To me, I saw how much better it was to be a boy (in both of my cultures), and I was like, “Sign me up.”


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